


Sober

by hurricxneamelia



Category: Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice
Genre: Angst, Drinking to Cope, Midseason 11, Other, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-26 00:39:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18272285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hurricxneamelia/pseuds/hurricxneamelia
Summary: She'd learned how to cope with death. Starting with her dad, then her fiancé, then her baby, she drugged herself out and buried the grief and pain. Then, when Amelia Shepherd was sober and finally thought she had her life on track, Derek died. She was used to the cycle of grief, but this time she was clean and sober. Regardless, she found herself back in the presence of her old comforts once more.





	Sober

**Author's Note:**

> There's a trigger warning here for drinking and suicidal ideation, stay safe loves!

Derek was dead. He was dead, dead as dirt. All day Amelia rolled that fact over in her mind until the phrase meant nothing. By now, it was words. Three simple words which meant very little if she ignored the implications. The neurosurgeon did so by making morbid, moderately tasteless jokes.  
Her own words rang through her mind. If Derek saw this he would roll over in his grave. Can you actually do that? Roll over in a grave? I mean a casket’s pretty snug, there’s not a lot of room to move in there. If Derek saw this, he would shake in his grave. Shimmy, maybe. 

Edwards’ uncomfortable face at those words mirrored what Amelia had been trying to ward off. She’d been through this before. After all, she lost her father, she lost Ryan, she lost her baby. She should know how to lose, but it never got any easier. The sadness radiating from everybody, the looks of pity, the worried friends calling. What could she expect, anyway? She was an addict. People expected her to fall off the wagon again when something traumatic like losing your brother occured.  
Deep down, Amelia appreciated her worried friends and family, but she wanted it all to stop. She didn’t want to lose anymore. She didn’t want her friends to have to care about her anymore. She didn’t want to cope. Hell, she didn’t want to be Hurricane Amelia anymore.

All day her harsh jokes helped her depersonalize and compartmentalize. After she wallowed in a depressive spell for a bit, she cleaned it up by neatly packaging the grief into box somewhere buried deep in her brain. She joked, she lectured, and she performed surgeries. Amelia did anything but think about her reality. She lived in a world of medical knowledge, patient care, and numbness. 

Unsurprisingly, people asked how she was. She ignored them. It was simple. She said she was fine. She carried on to the best of her ability, the only sign of falling apart at the seams she displayed was amping up the sarcasm, which for a Shepherd could mean everything or nothing at all.  
In this instance, for Amelia, it meant everything. She held herself together only with fragile bravado and denial. She denied the reality, the consequences of Derek’s death. Each day however, an unseen demon lashed out threatening to shatter the delicately crafted facade. That unseen demon bringing with it grief and anger all so bitter it was blinding. Amelia wanted to deny that as days passed the demon chipped at the barrier between it and its sweet prize until slowly, it cracked. Then, slowly its poison trickled through that crack. Once it was there, it corroded the wall from the inside. 

All at once then, it shattered. At first you felt nothing still because you tried to fight, but then you felt everything all at once.  
Amelia sat in front of a full bottle of unopened vodka. She was thirteen hundred something days sober. She’d worked hard for this, yet Amelia didn’t care. Numbly, she lifted the cool glass bottle from the table. Without thinking, her hand found the cheap metal screw off cap and soon enough it was in her hand. The faint scent of fresh boozed wafted toward her nose. 

She lifted the bottle to her lips and paused for a split second doubting herself. Then, suddenly a rush of an indefinable emotion broke free and rushed through her body feeling as if it was going to shred her heart, and all doubt faded away. So, she tipped the bottle back against her lips and the bitter liquid touched her throat. It burned, like all good alcohol was supposed to. 

In one moment, one thousand three hundred twenty one days of sobriety went down the drain and the dangerous, self loathing, destructive mania of intoxication washed through Amelia. She didn’t care. She didn’t want to fight anymore, or continue to live through the piteous gazes, to fight her feelings, to feel, to live without her brother. Derek had been her sibling, he’d been there for her since their dad. They’d been through it all, and had fights she believed would fracture their relationship beyond repair, yet they hadn’t. Now, she was alone. She had no one. Meredith ran just as Owen had. She didn’t want to cry, so she kept drinking. 

Vodka would lose its burn as it kept going. She’d stop feeling anything other than a warm tingling in the extremities. She didn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. In order to ward off the guilt and anxiety already building in her stomach, she listed off the symptoms of alcohol poisoning: confusion, vomiting, seizures, irregular breathing, hypothermia, skin discoloration, and unconsciousness. The normalcy of listing symptoms calmed Amelia. 

About an hour later and a half of a vodka bottle later, Amelia began to experience some of those symptoms. Her hands shook and the sweater she wore could no longer keep her warm enough; her chest rose and fell far too slowly. Amelia was calm though. She took another long swig. Now, it didn’t burn. She was numb in every sense of the word.Thoughts of Derek were far away and she could think; however, her thoughts consisted of nothing. Now that she could think clearly, she didn’t want to think. She had no reason to do so. Her addictive, completely self destructive behaviors had taken over. 

As Amelia raised the bottle to take another swig, she dropped the bottle as her hand involuntarily stiffened. As the feeling spread through her arms and down her back, in her haze Amelia realized, it was an atonic seizure. That was her last clear thought before she her world started to spin. She thought she’d panic when she could see the sky just before it fell, crashing onto her shoulders, but she wasn’t panicked. Of course, she felt flutters of anxiety, but the weight of the darkness settled atop her like a warm blanket. The demon was subdued. The minute before she lapsed out of fully consciousness, she was somewhere else. She wasn’t in Seattle anymore. She floated in a sea of nothing. 

Half an hour later, Richard Webber knocked on the door of Amelia’s home. When she yelled at him for asking her to coffee, he could sense something was wrong. So, he’d ordered some Chinese food for her after finding out from Maggie that Amelia hadn’t eaten a lot since Derek’s death. The deafening quiet radiating from inside was off. Richard knocked again, this time harder, “Amelia?” he called. The more he stood waiting for answer, the more his gut told him he was wrong. He pulled out his phone, ‘Have you talked to Amelia tonight?’ he texted Maggie. 

A few seconds later a response popped back up, ‘No, not since she left work. Why?’

‘She yelled at me for asking her to coffee. I’m worried about her so I came by to bring her food.’ 

‘Did she not answer her door?’

‘No.’

‘She keeps a spare key underneath the mat. Knock again though.’ 

‘Thanks,’ Richard texted back slipping his phone back in his pocket. 

He knocked on the door again, this time rapping on it with the flat of his hand. Webber stood at the door tapping his foot as he waited until he shook his head bending down to get the key. Once the door was open, the foyer was deathly silent again. He’d imagined upon hearing the door click open Amelia would walk down the hallway pissed that somebody had used her emergency key, but nothing. There were no sounds of footsteps, no showers running, or sounds of a TV going. “Amelia?” Webber called. No response. 

He set the food down by the door before making his way into the living room. Upon reaching the living room, he was not prepared to see Amelia half slumped over the couch, and a shattered glass bottle on the floor. That combined with the putrid smell of vodka spurred Richard into action. She relapsed and by the looks of her abnormally pale face, she’d had way too much.

“Shit,” he mumbled to himself pulling out his cell as he made his way over to Amelia. He pressed the emergency call button and put it up to his ear when the dispatch answered he said, “I need an ambulance. I’m with a friend of mine, a thirty five year old female. She’s unconscious from alcohol consumption.” 

Richard answered the questions asked and gave Amelia’s address before he hung up. Her skin was cold, too cold. Her pulse was slow and her muscles tense. By the time the ambulance got there, her pulse was slower. Time moved all too fast as paramedics knocked and he let them in. They asked him what he knew and he gladly gave answers. On the ambulance ride he listened to stats: eighty eight systolic, tachycardic, ninety two degree body temperature, all signs of alcohol poisoning.  
News of Amelia’s arrival spread around the ER as soon as she arrived. Labs showed her BAC was .34, dangerously high. 

“Dr. Webber, leave. She’s your friend. You can’t be here,” Avery said pointedly the tension evident in his voice as he worked on the unconscious neurosurgeon.  
Richard made no move to leave. “Get him out,” Avery nodded to one of the interns, Edwards, who was now pulling him out. 

“We can’t let you work on her. You’re her friend, you shouldn’t see this.”

“I know what this is like, I’m a doctor!” 

She shook her head, “Yes, but you know the rules.” 

Before Richard could respond, Leah closed the door of the trauma room. They put her in a trauma room for alcohol poisoning. Amelia was their family, it made sense. She’d also relapsed and nearly drank herself to death, maybe intentionally. She wasn’t exactly known for coping stellarly, this could have pushed her off the ledge. She knew how much was too much. Richard saw Pierce jogging his way out of the corner of his eye, “Is it true? She’s here because she’s…” Maggie trailed off. 

“Yeah,” Richard sighed. 

“You think it was intentional?”

“I- I don’t know.” Maggie hadn’t even thought about it that way, but now that Richard posed the question, she couldn’t help but wonder. Amelia never admitted her struggles with Derek’s death, but no one close to her was immune to the underlying pain. 

 

\------

 

Amelia’s eyes blinked open to a the sound of humming monitors and the dim light of the nurses corridor. She was here, alive. Surprise was a word running through her mind. She’d downed enough vodka to kill herself. She glanced over at the chairs seeing Maggie asleep on her hand. “Maggie,” Amelia rasped. Her throat was dry. 

The cardio surgeon’s eyes blinked open, slowly at first and then widely, “Amelia! You’re awake!” 

“Yeah,” she sighed gazing at Maggie, “how long was I out Can I have some water?” 

“Three days. They brought you in and put you on hemodialysis and gave you fluids. Yeah, hang on." Maggie stood up letting go of Amelia's hand to get her a  
glass of water, "Here," Maggie said with a nod and short, handing Amelia the cup with a closed lip smile.

"Thanks," Amelia nodded putting the straw between her lips and taking a long sip of the water. The refreshing water differed so greatly from the vodka she remembered dangerously downing apparently three days ago. She glanced at Maggie whose brown eyes remained trained on Amelia's face, a question ostensible in them. "What?" Amelia asked raising her brow briefly. She wasn't a fool. She could guess where the conversation was headed, and she sure didn't like it. She hated seeing the question, the sadness, and the pity glistening in the cardio surgeon’s brown eyes, so she resigned to stare at the bed sheets while she awaited an answer. 

Maggie looked down for a second as if she were summoning the courage and proper words to ask her question. She looked back up, "Was it on purpose?" 

Amelia's eyes remained trained on the bed. She didn’t want to do this. She couldn’t. At first, it hadn’t been, but then, she stopped caring. She stopped wanting to fight, but here she was. She was still Hurricane Amelia wrecking havoc upon those who around her. The brunette looked back at Maggie, a glint in her eyes, “I’m surprised it was only three days.” Despite the rasp of having not spoken for three days the scathing sardonic timbre resonated in the otherwise silent room, “With that much alcohol, I should have been out for a lot longer,” Amelia continued letting out a half chuckle.

Maggie sat back and looked at Amelia. It was such an Amelia Shepherd thing to do. It seemed to be her first line of defense. She didn’t want to feel the grief, or face the situation. She wanted to focus on anything but what she felt. “You ignored my question,” Maggie said raising an eyebrow. 

Amelia’s face dropped into a quiet line. Her eyes no longer held the glint of bravado they held seconds ago, “I was fine, I was managed. I had it together. I had my  
medicine and my lectures.” Her voice sang with a subtle bitterness and an overwhelming breaking numbness. 

“All you’re listing Amelia, are expendable things. You can’t rely on lecturing, and surgeries to cope. You haven’t processed what happened. Richard told me how  
you yelled at him when he asked you for coffee, that’s not normal.” 

“Yeah, well I’m not exactly normal am I?” Amelia snapped her eyes flashing with an indefinable emotion, “I can’t ‘process’ this. That’s why I did it,” she continued,  
“that’s why I broke my sobriety, are you happy now?”

Maggie frowned, “No, that’s not what I meant. You can’t go on like this. You have to face it! Amelia you’re running from your emotions! You ran from them the  
minute Derek died and you started making those morbid jokes, and you’re still running! You ran so far you broke something you worked so hard for! You have to it in and feel them, Amelia,” Maggie finished her brown eyes shining with frustration and sympathy. 

Amelia didn’t want to see Maggie care. She didn’t want to feel her grief. She’d survived this long without it, but she almost hadn’t, and by her own hand. “I don’t want to, Maggie. It’s not normal to feel like this or feel this horribly.” 

Maggie crossed her arms, “You are a doctor. Of all people, you should know this is normal. He was your brother. You can’t live like this anymore, and it seems to  
me like you didn’t want to live like that anymore.” 

The brunette looked away feeling tears fight their way into her eyes, “I can’t, I can’t. I can’t do it.” With each repetition, it was more and more difficult to keep  
herself under control.

Hesitantly, the cardiothoracic surgeon reached out to grasp one of Amelia’s hands, “You can, I promise. You need to, Amelia.”

All at once and suddenly, Amelia broke. A harsh sob ricocheted through her body. The minute she’d let her guard down, she lost it. She felt it all coursing through her veins. The anguish of losing her brother, the realization, despair, and guilt that she’d broken her sobriety and been okay, hell she'd tried to drink herself to death. She felt all of it, all at once and blindingly. Strong but gentle arms wrapped around her as sobs wracked Amelia’s body. 

She held onto Maggie for dear life. In that moment, Maggie was her lifeline. Maggie held Amelia to the earth as she expelled nearly a years worth of pent up grief and misery. Maggie rubbed Amelia’s back as she sobbed. She knew not to say anything yet. Amelia had to get it out and let everything in to start healing. There are five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Amelia finally made it to acceptance. She was there, and it wasn’t pretty. Acceptance reared its ugly head after a year, and the pain was just as fresh as if Derek had died yesterday. Her body shook with waves of bereavement and overwhelming grief as she finally felt the emotions she time and time again put off through each death. The difference now was, she felt them without drugs, and fully sober in the wake of nearly losing her own life. 

By the time Amelia’s tears stopped flowing, a peaceful state of numbness washed over her senses. Maggie was still there with her, holding her hand. For the first time she noticed the darkness in the room. “How long have you been here?” Amelia asked quietly. 

Maggie shrugged, “Richard and I trade off sitting with you. Sometimes Owen drops by. I’ve been here since nine when I got out of surgery.”

“Owen’s back?”

“Yeah.”

Amelia nodded, “When will I be able to go home?”

Maggie stopped in her tracks. For the three days Bailey, Richard, Maggie and anyone else who wanted to throw their ten cents in had argued over whether or not Amelia would need a psych consult when she woke up, and in the end they finally came to the conclusion to get her one once she woke up. “Well, you have to have a psych consult, and I think you know how that works…” she trailed off, debating whether or not to ask again, “Amelia, was it on purpose?”

The neurosurgeon swallowed permitting to silence fill the room for a moment as she judged Maggie's face. She saw no judgement or anger, only worry and curiousity. She took a deep breath. 'No. You won't cry again,' she internally warned herself, Finally, Amelia answered the dark haired woman's question, “Not at first no, but then, yeah it was.” 

Her words rang in the now silent room. What many of Amelia’s friends had hypothesized, she had affirmed. The guilt of her actions weighed heavily on her shoulders as the gravity of her assertion filled the room. Her friends prepared themselves to hear it, but no amount of preparation could prepare someone to hear a declaration like that. “Then you know you’ll probably have to stay inpatient,” Maggie finally said deciding on a clinical statement. 

The brunette nodded unable to speak. She’d already experienced more than enough emotion about Derek and what she’d done. She didn’t need Maggie’s emotion in that moment; she couldn’t handle it, so she was relieved to hear Maggie speak in clinical terms. She could process that better than emotion at that moment. She was at rock bottom again, and this time she'd fallen and hit harder than ever before.


End file.
